Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Posted in Books, History, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, United States on 2013-06-10 00:00Z by Steven

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

  • Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
  • Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
  • Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
  • Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
  • 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
  • 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
  • 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
  • 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
  • Coda “Race Feeling”
  • Notes
  • Index
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